


The Music Is Nothing

by Deannie



Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Deaf Clint Barton, Gen, I mean it, If you're looking for AoU compliance look elsewhere, totally au
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-06-19
Updated: 2015-06-19
Packaged: 2018-04-05 04:06:38
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,252
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4165149
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Deannie/pseuds/Deannie
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>For a while, all he knew was that Natalia was alive, he was alive, and he’d done something really stupid to ensure those two things. He didn’t know what—and honestly, he hurt so damn much that it hardly mattered.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Music Is Nothing

**Author's Note:**

> This story was started quite a while ago and was going to be a number of parts. But I sort of feel like Age of Ultron Jossed the whole thing so much that I'm not sure it's worth pursuing. So here's the beginning. I might write the part that was supposed to take place during the Avengers movie at some point. *shrug* Or not.
> 
> As always, _**this is lip-read speech**_ and (THIS IS SIGN LANGUAGE).

### April

For a while, all he knew was that Natalia was alive, he was alive, and he’d done something really stupid to ensure those two things. He didn’t know what—and honestly, he hurt so damn much that it hardly mattered. Nat swam in and out of his unfocused vision and she looked stoic and Russian and determined. 

He was freezing some of the time and on fire others. He felt the blood rushing through his veins, seeming to get stuck in the right side of his chest, and tried to get the world to settle around him as it dipped and swirled. They were alive. Nat was here. It would keep. 

A couple of days later, he knew that his head and chest, specifically, hurt a whole hell of a lot and the world still rocked and spun around him and none of it made any sense at all. Natalia stood guard over him and people in suits and scrubs tried to explain whatever really stupid thing he’d done to make sure they survived, but they’d usually get as far as something he interpreted as **_...Barton, ....your head hurts, ….can you understand...?_** before his eyes closed and he couldn’t hear them anymore. 

Which also didn’t make sense, but again, it would keep. If there was one thing Clint was good at, it was waiting. 

* * * * * * * 

He wasn't dizzy the next time—at least not enough to feel like he was going to puke. But there was a mask over his nose and mouth, full of too-dry air, which didn’t help him as he tried to hack up a few organs. A hand on his arm distracted him from the fire in his chest, and one look at Natalia’s face told him he was more than just sick, he was in actual trouble. She’d had to learn too early to mask her feelings and was damn good at it—so the fact that he could tell she was scared, even with how horrible he felt, told him things were even worse than they had been. 

He saw her say something about pneumonia and a lung or a gun (or maybe both), and about that time, a nurse came around and asked her to leave (she might not have been speaking English or even Russian, but Clint could read the intent in her face), which made Clint laugh because hell if Nat was going to do that, right? 

The silent laugh turned into another painful, wrenching cough—he swore he tasted blood this time—and he tried to keep his eyes open so he could hear what was going on, but it was a lost cause. Natalia was here, though, and the look on her face as she turned to send the nurse away was hard and angry and over-protective. As always. She’d take care of things while he was gone, if he didn’t spontaneously combust from the heat coming out of him. 

* * * * * * * 

It was another week before he really woke up and took a look around. He recognized the medical room in the SHIELD safe house in Tbilisi (and how the hell had Nat gotten him back to Georgia, anyway?). He’d ended up here after that clusterfuck in Vake Park nearly five years ago. He'd gotten through that one. He expected he'd survive this, too, regardless of the unrelenting ache in his chest. 

He was alone and it was dawn, but neither of those things was the reason for the utter silence of his surroundings. It was a silence he remembered from almost thirty years ago. He didn't hate it any less now. 

He rubbed absently at the bandages on his right hand, poking at the hurt, and looked out the window at a lightening springtime sky. There was a blackbird in a nearby tree, beak opening and closing as it sang soundlessly. 

Clint tilted his head back, closing his eyes against the day. God, he was so screwed... 

* * * * * * * 

They’d been doing a standard extraction out of Chechnya, which should have been easy enough, except that one of the men guarding the scientist had recognized Nat from some op she’d run back when she was working for the bad guys. Obviously not _this_ bad guy, though, as he'd immediately pulled a gun and started shooting. 

"Have you ever thought of dyeing your hair? Maybe contacts?" Clint had shouted over the melee, letting another arrow fly. The building was all but crumbling around them, making this firefight a little more dangerous, because that was just fun, right? "I thought spies were supposed to blend in." 

Natalia had rolled her eyes at him. "We’ll discuss my fashion choices when we get out of here.” 

“No we won’t,” he replied bluntly. That was pretty much the last thing he wanted to do— 

Scratch that. Pretty much the last thing he wanted to do was get shot. Which was, of course, exactly what happened next. The pain blossomed in the right side of his chest and it took a few seconds for him to decide that yes, he could breathe. Sort of. Hurt like a bitch, but he could do it. 

“Hawkeye, damn it!” 

“I’m fine,” he grated back, realizing Natalia must have said his name a couple of times at least, to sound that angry. 

Damn, they were up shit creek here. They were still facing fifteen more goons—and the guy was only a nuclear physicist, so why all the firepower?—and he and Natalia were going to run out of ammo at some point soon. His quiver was feeling distinctly light. 

“Remember Grozny?” he called, dialing his bow and reaching back for the arrow once the proper head had been put on. He managed not to scream at the pull on the bullet hole in his chest, but the motion left him breathless, and not just from the pain. Which was probably a problem, but wouldn't kill him before the goons did. 

“Can you shoot like that?” she asked from her hiding place behind a stack of machine part boxes. She had a firm fist wrapped around the scientist’s arm and a gun in her other hand. She looked like she thought his idea was a bad one. Probably was. Wouldn’t be the first time. 

“No,” he replied bluntly. “I only need one arm to throw. Give me some cover and get your plugs in.” He worked on separating the sonic blast arrowhead from the shaft and set it in his lap. 

He should’ve just trusted Natalia to do what she was supposed to. Instead, he made the mistake of popping up long enough to get a look at the room and make sure she and the scientist were both wearing the ear plugs that would save them from a blast so loud, it would render most people unconscious. Clint had heard that the device SHIELD Science had fitted those arrowheads with had actually killed a person once. As it was, if it landed too near you, losing your hearing for good was pretty much assured. 

Nat and the scientist were both good to go, and Clint was about to crouch back down and put in his own earplugs, when one of the guards saw him and launched a knife in his direction. He couldn’t quite get out of the way, and the blade punched through his right hand and embedded itself in the wall behind him. The pain was incredible and again, he fought to breathe, as the unnatural position pulled on the even more unnatural hole in his chest. 

He grunted angrily and fished for his ear plugs. A barrage of gunfire hit just above his pinned hand and he flinched hard… and the damn plugs fell out of his hand and rolled out of reach. 

Well, fuck, then. 

_Okay, Barton,_ he told himself, stretching out his legs and catching the arrowhead between his feet. _Time to man up._

He pulled his feet toward him and grabbed the sonic tip, activating the priming switch. He wouldn’t have to try to get to his bow now. The arrow would explode on impact. He hoped Nat could get them out, because, for the next couple of hours, he was going to be out like a light. 

Straining painfully against the knife that pinned him against the wall, Clint pulled back with his left hand and lobbed the arrowhead— 

—just as one of the many bullets flying around the room went through the same space. It was a one in a trillion chance, he was sure, but as bullet and arrowhead met, not ten feet from his face, he was hit with a combination physical and sonic concussive blast that sliced through his eardrums, literally. He could barely feel the blood running from them as he blacked out... 

* * * * * * * 

A hand was on his arm suddenly, and he was back in Georgia, out of his memories and into a reality he really didn't much want to face. He turned from the window to see Natalia sitting next to him. The light had changed and he wondered if he’d actually dozed off, or just gone away for a while. 

**_You... there… ly?_** she asked in absolute silence, the words broken by his rusty lip-reading. Looked like he’d have a reason to brush up again. 

“I’m here,” he replied, consciously moderating a volume he couldn’t hear. 

Natalia smiled. **_I thought I… break… new ‘ner._**

Clint took a minute to parse that before he nodded. _I thought I was going to have to break in a new partner._ Her movements were too tight, too controlled—made it hard to read her lips. How quickly could Nat learn sign language? He still knew every word he'd ever been taught and it wouldn’t take long to learn more. It wasn't any harder than Ashkunu, right? They’d both learned that in a month. Well, enough to get by anyway. 

They were going to have to do more than get by though, weren't they? 

“Is this permanent?” he asked bluntly, wondering if his voice sounded scared and thick and pathetic, or if that was just on the inside. But there was no reason to beat around the bush and he knew Natalia wouldn’t lie to him. 

She looked like she really wanted to, though. **_They think..., yes._** She leaned forward. **_... sorry, Clint—_**

“Shut up, Natalia. This wasn’t your fault,” he said, and his tongue did feel thick now. His eyes kept trying to close of their own accord and he felt like he was breathing treacle. Maybe he wasn’t ready to be awake for quite so long. Natalia had a weird little quirk of a smile on her face, though. “What?” 

**_You... me Natalia,_** she said. 

God, she was hard to hear! "Of course, I called you Natalia,” he ventured. 

**_No,_** she started to explain, **_You... me—_** Suddenly she shook her head and grabbed for the pad of paper and pen he hadn’t noticed on the bedside table. She wrote one Russian word in flowing Cyrillic script: **Natasha.** Clint grimaced. It was the kind of nickname you used on your five-year-old sister. She'd been given enough trouble about her age since he'd brought her into SHIELD three years ago at the age of nineteen. 

“Sorry,” he replied with an apologetic shrug. Not too apologetic, though. He figured he was allowed to call her something cute after three years together—though maybe not to her face if he wanted to live. “Thick tongue.” 

She grinned and shook her head, a shine of comfort and maybe the beginnings of peace in her eyes. He wondered how close he’d been to dying in this whole mess. **_It’s... I ... eep that._**

Clint grinned back tightly and hated that he couldn’t even understand his own partner anymore. 

### May

When he'd gotten hurt, as a kid, they'd just let his ears heal. He'd been deaf for a while until he wasn't again. There'd never been talk of hearing aids because the damage was temporary. 

So he didn't know, until the doctor slipped them into his ears, that hearing aids were itchy. They were itchy as hell, in fact, and the sounds in the room were canned. The lack of spatial acuity was just annoying…. 

“Testing _odin, dva, tri._ ” 

Clint grinned, though, as he heard Natasha counting off in Russian. _Natasha._ She'd taken to his slip of the tongue, apparently, and he had to admit, the diminutive actually suited her better than her proper name. 

She'd also jumped whole hog into learning to speak his language. She spoke more distinctly now, her jaw and face less tight so she was easier to read. She'd learned all the ASL he knew and they were competing now to see who could learn more than the other. Almost made the unrelenting silence worth it, while they waited for his ears to heal enough to try the hearing aids. 

His smile grew. There hadn’t been a sound for him in a month, and he loved the hell out of it that her voice was the first thing he heard. And was thoroughly pissed off that he had to look around the room to find out where she was. Static was everywhere, whistling through his ears, and he couldn’t begin to figure out what was going on. 

“This isn’t going to be good enough,” he told the doctor in front of him. “I can’t work like this.” 

“Agent Barton—” 

“Yeah, I’m not going to be an agent for long if I can’t even tell where the hell a sound is coming from,” he grated. He could feel himself sliding toward panic all of a sudden, going from joy at hearing her to terror and anger in record time. It was stupid, he knew, but damn it, they told him he’d be okay. They told him they could get him back in the fucking field! He couldn’t do it this way! 

“Clint, relax,” Natasha said quietly, crackling over the whistle that was clearly just part of the hearing aid or his busted ears or whatever. He knew she was walking up on his left and he _still_ couldn’t hear it properly. The sound nearly hurt, it was so disorganized. “This is temporary.” 

“Agent Romanoff—” the doctor began, tinny and whiny and a little broken up. 

Natasha glared the guy down as only she could, and looked Clint in the eyes, pulling his focus away from the way the world sounded through machines. “Temporary,” she repeated slowly. He read her lips and tried to ignore her distorted voice. “We’ll find a better solution.” 

Clint tried to calm himself, he did. But his hands were itching for his bow and he couldn’t aim if he couldn’t God damn hear and he couldn’t work if he couldn’t aim and then what the hell good was he? 

“Nat,” he begged. “I can’t do this, okay?” His voice was foreign in his ears. It sounded like a recording. Like he wasn’t the one talking. He hated these things more than the silence. “Maybe I can just go without them—use hand signals or something. They’re almost worse than being deaf, for God’s sake.” 

Except they weren’t. They weren’t because, tinny or not, Nat’s voice was still infinitely reassuring when she grabbed his shaking hand and promised: “We’ll figure this out.” 

* * * * * * * 

So they tried. It took time for his natural grace to return, but he fell back on his circus training to perfect that and relearn how to jump and fly with ears that didn’t balance him quite the way they used to. His chest and hand weren’t up to the bow for another month, but he was already able to shoot a gun again, and his aim wasn’t affected in the least by the fact that he couldn’t hear for shit. 

The problem came when they entered the melee room. Designed to test an agent’s reflexes in various _difficult_ situations, the room could be filled with gunfire or mortar rounds or teams of other agents out to take you down. 

And Clint got taken down a lot. Every damn time, in fact. The first time, it was because he didn’t hear the agent who snuck up behind him—the simulated gunfire overloaded the hearing aids. The second time, he aimed for a sound in the darkness and missed— _he missed_ —because he couldn’t pinpoint it close enough. He got drunk for the first time in nearly five years that night, letting the vodka wash the shame away. 

There was a third time and a fourth and a fifth… Eventually he had to go out and buy more booze. 

He couldn't work. He was a danger to himself and to his partner, pure and simple. The higher ups were sad to do it, but they shackled him to a desk because he really couldn’t do his job anymore. 

And God, he knew it. The hearing aids didn’t help him—they didn’t do much more than remind him that he was deaf. Oh sure, he didn’t have to lip-read _everything_ , but he did miss most of any conversation in a crowded place. Which wasn’t much of a problem—he just didn’t go to crowded places any more. Or really anywhere. He spent more time than he should on the roof of his apartment building with various bottles of alcohol, but that was the extent of his social life these days. 

Well, Natasha helped, when she was there. He wasn’t his dad, after all—he wasn’t going to get drunk in front of her, so when she was around, he was sober. Bitter, but sober. But Fury had work for her, so sometimes Stoli was who he turned to. (A CHIP OFF THE OLD BLOCK,) he’d signed drunkenly to himself one night, proud he’d remembered the sign for chip. Just as useless as his old man, too. 

He didn’t bother to follow the instructions for “How to adjust to your new hearing aids,” because they mostly involved shit like listening to music (which just gave him a headache now and sounded like cats fighting over a twitching bird) or having a brief conversation with a friend on the phone (which was so frustrating he’d actually broken his phone—no great loss there, he guessed) or reading aloud to yourself (the reading didn’t bother him but he absolutely hated the sound of his own voice now). None of it helped make the world any less a mishmash of confusing static, so as soon as he got home every day, he took out the fucking torture devices and watched the silent world go by. 

He should have known Nat wouldn’t let him wallow for long. 

“Come on, Hawkeye,” she said as she walked into his office one July afternoon, throwing his jacket at him. “We’re going out.” 

Clint shrugged into it. It was easier than fighting her when she had that “I’ll fix _this_ ” look in her eye. “Where are we going?” 

She turned to him, walking backward out the door as she made a gesture like she was plucking a leaf out of the air. (OUT.) 

He snorted and let her lead the way. “Well, thanks, Nat. That was informative.” 

She drove. It took him fifteen minutes to figure out that they were headed into the countryside. “Seriously, where are you taking me?” 

“Someplace quiet,” she said, glancing at him with a grin. 

He flashed back an infinitely more bitter one. “Everywhere’s quiet now.” 

“No, it’s not. That’s your problem.” 

(WHAT?) he signed, striking a finger across his hand in irritation. It was sometimes more comfortable to just sign his words than to feel them silently leave his lungs, only to be mutated and twisted by the machines in his ears. 

“Every time you’ve lost focus, it’s been because you heard something that distracted you,” she said. “It’s not that you can’t hear, it’s that you hear differently now. You need to learn what to do with it.” 

“No,” he bit out rudely. “It’s pretty much that I can’t hear, Nat.” (BECAUSE I’M FUCKING DEAF!) he shouted in sign, nearly slicing the corner of his lip with his fingernail in his anger. 

“But not stupid,” she shot back at him evenly. “If you want back in the field, you’ll learn what you need to and work around what you can’t do any more.” 

(WHATEVER,) he signed, sitting back and turning away from her to look out the window as the suburbs gave way to green space. He was finished. Hell, maybe he’d go back to the circus now. He could still shoot, after all. 

He just couldn’t protect anybody by doing it. 

* * * * * * * 

“Close your eyes.” 

“So help me God, Nat, if you tell me to ‘wax on, wax off,’ I’m walking back to DC,” he grumbled thirty-five minutes later, once they’d parked beside an old barn in the middle of nowhere and were standing next to a field of cows. 

“That was a good movie, don’t knock it,” Natasha replied, a grin on her face that he couldn’t hear in her voice. “Now stand right there and close your eyes.” 

He sighed deeply, but closed his eyes. At this point, he was willing to try anything. 

She didn’t speak, but he heard her moving, and automatically his brain tried to figure out where she was. She’d gone… right. 

“Hawkeye?” she called—from his left. 

He made a V with each hand and slammed them together. (FUCK) was actually a pretty satisfying sign. Most swear words were, really. 

“Try it again,” she whispered. It sounded like sandpaper when she whispered. It took too much attention to really understand the words sometimes… God, he hated this. 

“Pay attention,” Nat barked suddenly, from a completely different direction. “Clint, this is your future we’re talking about—” 

“I don’t _have_ a future, Nat—” 

“Then this is _my_ future, all right!?” she growled, in his face now. The violence and emotion in the words causing him to snap his eyes open and look at her. She was scared. 

Why was she scared? 

“I need you, Barton,” she ground out, softly enough that the fucking hearing aids broke up the words and made it sound like she was crying when her eyes were bone dry and serious. “I need my partner and I won’t just let you give up.” She smiled wryly. “You did say I’d do the same for you. I guess you were right.” 

Do the same for him. Give him a second chance… Clint remembered, vividly and in full stereo, the day he’d stood with a gun to her head in an empty alley in Pripyat. 

>   
>  _”Are you going to kill me, Agent Barton?”_
> 
> _She’d saved his life the day before—she’d known he was hunting her, yet she’d shot down two Soviet agents who’d come looking for him. She was all of nineteen and looked even younger, and Clint had seen something… salvageable._
> 
> _He’d also seen the agent trying to sneak up behind them, the man’s gun trained not on him, but on Natalia. Execution, in payment for her betrayal…_
> 
> _”You’d do the same for me,” he’d murmured, and raised his gun just enough to shoot the other man through the heart._

He smiled. God, they’d been through so much in the last three years. Surely he could go through a little more, right? He closed his eyes. “Okay, Mr. Miyagi. Get on with it.” 

Natasha walked almost silently… to the left? And back again? 

“Shut up, Barton,” she said. From his right. 

(FUCK) really was a very satisfying sign. 

* * * * * * * 

### December

“Merry Christmas.” Natasha dropped another file on Clint’s desk. Clint’s stupid, fucking, I’m-stuck-here-until-I-can-hack-it-in-the-field desk. He was going slowly insane and he had the paperwork in triplicate to prove it. No one seemed to know what to do with the deaf master marksman, so he languished, wishing they’d either figure it out or cut him loose. 

It had taken months to really work out a new way of doing things, but he’d finally cracked the code and figured out how to make it all work for him, and he could take down pretty much any team with bow or gun. And still he was stuck here, because they didn’t trust that his disability wouldn’t still cause problems in the field. 

Whatever. 

“What the hell is this?” he groused, ignoring the large envelope and looking her up and down for any lingering signs of weakness. She’d been farmed out to one of Fury’s other teams two months ago and had come home with a bullet in her leg. He couldn’t help thinking he could have prevented that if he’d been there. 

“Open it, Barton.” She made it clear with her glare that she was just fine, thank you, so he picked up the envelope that looked too much like an op-box and opened it. 

And it was an op-box. A map fell out. A dossier on their target, an extraction plan, a precis on the surrounding area and current political situation… 

“I’m in?” he asked incredulously. He really had figured Nick had just decided he wasn’t worth trying to find a place for. 

“I need my partner back,” Nat said, an easy smile on her face, though her eyes were assessing him carefully. “The rest of these guys are useless with a bow.” 

Clint looked over the file, memorizing the target’s features quickly, before looking back up at her with a broad grin. God, he couldn’t wait to get back in the field! 

“When do we leave?” 

* * * * * * * 

the end


End file.
